Sam Wood’s choc pudding is how you can sneak veggies into your dessert

How to get your toddler to eat more vegetables? Disguise them as a self-saucing chocolate pudding of course. This dessert is as decadent as chocolate cake gets, with a red-velvet moist interior that gets its hue from the added beetroot ingredient.

Beetroot is a great source of iron and folate, with recent studies claiming beetroot can help lower blood pressure, boost exercise performance and prevent dementia.

Chocolate sauce

Method

2. Add butter, eggs and rice malt syrup straight into the greased loaf tin. Whisk together with a fork or rubber whisk to avoid scratching your tin. Add in the beetroot and stir through.

3. Add in almond meal, baking powder, raw cacao powder and sea salt and fold through the wet mixture. Smooth out the top with the back of a wooden spoon or spatula.

4. For the sauce, add the raw cacao powder and rice malt syrup to a measuring jug with a spout. Pour in boiling water until you reach one and a half cups. Whisk together with a fork until there are no lumps.

5. Then, carefully pour the chocolate sauce over the back of a large metal spoon and onto the top of the cake batter. Be careful here, you don’t want to break the batter, just leave a layer of chocolate sauce on top.

6. Place the pudding in the middle of the preheated oven and bake for 30 minutes.

7. Once cooked, remove from the oven and serve straight away on its own or with some full-fat yoghurt.

A note on sweetness: This recipe only contains 1/2 teaspoon of added sweetener per serve and we have kept the serving sizes small. However, do note that if you are making this dessert for others who haven't quit or reduced their sugar intake, you may like to add a little more rice malt syrup to suit their taste buds. Know that in doing so we would recommend this dessert for only very special occasions.